In the April 16 issue of New York magazine, Justin Davidson writes about two orchestra festivals seeking to enliven the creativity of orchestra programming. “Next month Carnegie Hall hosts ‘Spring for Music,’ a weeklong roundup of North American orchestras … There was no mistaking the zeal and focus, the you-gotta-hear-this! urgency of the ‘American Mavericks’ festival that recently filled Carnegie Hall with a week of strange and marvelous sounds. Michael Tilson Thomas led the San Francisco Symphony and a gang of similarly minded ensembles on an expedition into the ornery heart of twentieth-century American music—¬music made by the kind of people who like to pound and whisper and stuff chords full of juicy dissonances. … Tilson Thomas made conducting this music seem fun the way extreme sports are fun: You need precision and skill to savor the danger. In Edgard Varèse’s gleefully deafening Amériques, he managed the whole delirious affair with refined precision. This was no shaggy jam session, but a rigorous evocation of a freak-out. You could forgive an orchestra for lapsing back into mildness after that, but night after night the San Franciscans sustained a stunning level of intensity.”
Posted April 11, 2012
